# Idoru

- Author: [William Gibson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-gibson.md)
- Quotes: 14
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-gibson/idoru

## Quotes

> Human in every detail but then not so…He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy’s idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band’s fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that.

> If Laney had anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces.
>
> She was nothing like that…And now her eyes met his.
>
> He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows…Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk.

> “Walled City is of the net, but not on it," Masahiko said. "There are no laws here, only agreements.”
>
> “You can’t be on the net and not be on the net,” Chia said.
>
> “Distributed processing,” he said. “Interstitial. It began with a shared killfile.”

> Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative.

> Gomi Boy’s cigarette looked like it had been made in a factory: a perfect white tube with a brown tip he put to his lips. Chia had seen those in old movies; sometimes, the ones they hadn’t gone through yet to digitally erase them.

> “You haven’t told me what I’m looking for.”
>
> “Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan’s audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

> ”That Walled City, Zona, what is that?“
>
> “They say it began as a shared 'killfile.' It is an old expression. A way to avoid incoming messages. With the killfile in place, it was like those messages never existed. They never reached you. This was when the net was new, understand? Someone had the idea to turn the killfile inside out. This is not really how it happened, you understand, but this is how the story is told: that the people who founded Hak Nam were angry, because the net had been very free, you could do what you wanted, but then the governments and the companies, they had different ideas of what you could, what you couldn’t do. So these people, they found a way to unravel something. A little place, a piece, like cloth. They made something like a killfile of everything, everything they didn’t like, and they turned that inside out.”

> “What kind of hotel did you say this is?” Chia got into the elevator.
>
> “Love hotel,” Masahiko said.
>
> “What’s that?” Going up.
>
> “Private rooms. For sex. Pay by the hour…but people who come here sometimes wish to port. There is a reposting service that makes it very hard to trace. Also for phoning, very secure.”
>
> Chia was looking at the round pink furry bed.

> “Okay,” Arleigh said.“What are the nodal points?”
>
> Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. “It’s like seeing things in clouds, except the things you see are really there.”
>
> “Yamazaki promised me you weren’t crazy.”
>
> “It’s not crazy. It’s something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition.”

> “What did Blackwell mean, about Rez wanting to marry a Japanese girl who isn’t real?”
>
> “Rei Toei. She is a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what I believe they call a ‘synthespian,’ in Hollywood.”
>
> Laney closed his eyes, opened them. “Then how can he marry her?”

> “But do they really have singers who don’t exist?”
>
> “The idol-singers,” he said. “The idoru. Some of them are enormously popular.”
>
> “Do people kill themselves over them?”
>
> “I don’t know. They could do, I suppose.”
>
> “Do people marry them?”

> Masahiko’s room…was a boy-nightmare, the sort of environment Chia knew from the brothers of friends, its floor and ledgelike bed long vanished beneath unwashed clothes, ramen-wrappers, Japanese magazines with wrinkled covers…It smelled faintly of boy, of ramen, and of coffee. Though he seemed very clean, now that she was this close, and she had a vague idea that Japanese people generally were. Didn’t they love to bathe?

> Masahiko pointed along the street, past a fast-food franchise called California Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm tree against one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had drawn on their hands in her class on European history…Then two of them had gotten into a fight over which way you were supposed to draw the twisted parts on the cross…and one of them had zapped the other with a stungun…and the teacher had to call the police.

> The rich and the famous, Kathy had once said, were seldom that way by accident. It was possible to be one or the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both.